Guide · Accessibility
AODA and your
website, plainly.
Most of what is written about Ontario's website accessibility rules comes from companies selling accessibility software, and it tends to make the rules sound broader and the fines larger than they are. Here is what the regulation actually says, who it applies to, and what is worth doing even if it does not apply to you.
Published 2026-09-21 · Formory Group
The short answer.
If your organisation has 50 or more employees in Ontario, your public website has had to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA since January 1, 2021. That comes from section 14 of the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation (O. Reg. 191/11) under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.
If you have 1 to 49 employees, the website requirement does not apply to you. You still have other duties — accessible customer service, and providing information in an accessible format when someone asks for it — but there is no legal deadline for making the site itself conform.
What the rule actually requires.
The standard named in the regulation is WCAG 2.0, not the newer 2.1 or 2.2. New sites had to meet Level A from 2014; since 2021 all public websites and web content of a large organisation must meet Level AA. Two success criteria are excluded outright: live captions (1.2.4) and audio description for pre-recorded video (1.2.5).
It covers websites you control directly or through a contract that lets you change them, and content published after January 1, 2012. There is also an exception where meeting the requirement is "not practicable" — which is narrower than it sounds and not something to rely on without advice.
You will read claims online that Ontario is moving to WCAG 2.2 by 2027. As of September 2026 the regulation still names WCAG 2.0; section 14 has not been amended.
The deadline that is actually close.
Separate from the website rule, every business and non-profit with 20 or more employees in Ontario must file an accessibility compliance report every three years. The next one is due December 31, 2026, through the province's Accessibility Compliance Reporting Portal.
If you have 50 or more employees, that report asks whether your website meets the standard. Answering it honestly is the reason to look at your site this autumn rather than next year. Giving false information in the report is itself an offence under the Act.
What the penalties really are.
Vendors like to quote "$100,000 a day". That figure exists, but it applies to prosecutions for specific offences — false information in a report, ignoring a director's order — and to administrative penalties only in the most serious cases with a history of contraventions.
The ordinary administrative penalty for a corporation is in the range of $500 to $15,000, issued with an order to comply. The province's most recent published enforcement report, for 2017, lists six director's orders and three administrative penalties across all accessibility standards. Enforcement has been light. That is not a reason to ignore the rule, but it is a reason to ignore anyone selling you panic.
Why an overlay widget is not the answer.
The accessibility toolbars sold as a one-line fix do not make an inaccessible site conform. The problems WCAG cares about — images with no text alternative, forms whose fields have no labels, text with too little contrast, menus that cannot be used with a keyboard — live in the page itself and have to be fixed there.
The good news for a small business site is that those fixes are ordinary build quality. A page built properly in the first place — real headings, labelled forms, readable contrast, working keyboard focus — meets most of Level AA without anyone thinking of it as an accessibility project.
Worth doing even if you are exempt.
A good share of your customers are older, or reading on a phone in bright sunlight, or using a screen reader, or navigating with a keyboard. Every one of the fixes above also makes a site easier to use for everybody else, and most of them help search engines read the page too. For a business under 50 employees there is no deadline — just customers.
This guide is general information from the regulation and ontario.ca, not legal advice. If you are a large organisation facing the December 2026 report, the province's own guidance on how to make websites accessible is the place to start.
Questions
Straight answers.
I have 12 employees. Do I need to do anything?
Not for the website itself. You do have customer-service duties under the AODA, and if a customer asks for information in an accessible format you must provide it. If you have 20 or more employees you also file the compliance report.
How do I count employees?
The thresholds are 20 and 50 employees in Ontario. If you are anywhere near either, read the province's guidance on counting employees on ontario.ca before assuming you are under it.
Will an accessibility plugin make my site compliant?
No. Overlays change how a page is displayed but do not fix missing labels, alternative text or keyboard access in the underlying page. Conformance has to be built in.
Is my Wix or Squarespace site compliant automatically?
The platform gives you the ability to comply; it does not do it for you. Alternative text, heading structure, colour contrast and form labels are still choices you make on each page.
Before you decide anything
Find out whether
you have a problem.
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rebuilding?
Send us the address and what you do. We will look at what is there and tell you whether a rebuild is worth the money, or whether the problem is somewhere else entirely.